Sherwood Park-Fort Saskatchewan MP Garnett Genuis introduced his first Private Member’s Bill to Parliament last week.
The bill surrounds the topic of involuntary organ harvesting and deals with major human rights concerns, particularly in countries such as China, where members of minority faiths, such as Falun Gong, and incarcerated individuals have had organs forcibly removed for donation.
“It is a huge problem, and this bill addresses Canadian law. It makes it a criminal offense for a Canadian to receive an organ in another country for which there is not consent,” Genuis said, adding the bill renders foreign nationals who have been involved with organ harvesting inadmissible to Canada.
However, Genuis noted the bill does enable Canadians to receive legal organ donations from other countries, permitting there is a paper trail associated with how the organ was acquired. Currently, there is no Canadian law regarding acquiring an involuntarily harvested organ from another country.
“It deals with an important issue of human life and human dignity, it addresses a clear gap in Canadian law, it is substantive, it will likely have a real impact on people’s lives. It is the kind of legislation that Canada can use to set an example and encourage other countries to do the same thing,” he said.
Genuis said the bill is a cross-party initiative, as the same bill was proposed in the last parliament by retired Liberal MP Irwin Cotler.
“I am certainly giving him full credit for his work on it, but now that he is no longer a Member of Parliament, the work needs to continue,” Genuis said.
Additionally, former MP David Kilgour, who at separate times in his career has sat with both the red and blue, collaborated with Genuis on the creation of the bill.
Kilgour has worked extensively researching involuntary organ harvesting in China, publishing the Kilgour-Matas report in 2006 alongside human rights lawyer David Matas.
Although initially difficult to prove outright that the Chinese government was persecuting members of the Falun Gong, criminals and other minority groups and harvesting their organs, the report cites a variety of evidence supporting the allegation.
For instance, the report noted that wait-times for organ donation in China, according to the China International Transplantation Assistant Centre, the Oriental Organ Transplant Centre, and the Changzheng Hospital in Shanghai’s website, is a matter of one to two weeks.
Contrarily, at the time of writing, the report states that in 2003, the average wait time in Canada for a kidney was 32.5 months.
Additionally, the report cites a variety of first- and second-hand witness accounts regarding organ harvesting, ranging from family members of individuals who were incarcerated for practising Falun Gong noticing surgical scars on the bodies of deceased loved ones, admissions from doctors from seven hospitals, two detention centres and two public courts — obtained from a third-party posing as a an individual interested in acquiring an organ — and accounts from past prison detainees stating they had received extensive physical examinations, including X-rays and various blood tests.
“The other thing is, (the bill) is very important at this point in time, when the government is talking about trying to deepen our relationship with China, that we be very clear about human rights issues,” Genuis said.
He added that China is a rising world power, but one with a government that is ideologically very different from Canada.
“There are issues around human rights, issues around the environment, issues around intellectual property, issues around industrial espionage, and how that can happen when you have a closer relationship,” he said. “So there are a lot of these concerns and risks that are out there, and this is dealing with one dimension of that relationship.”
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